Oh To Be Young...

…And filled with angst about whether you should start acting like an adult or use your twenties for grand adventure. Twenty-seven-year-old Amanda FitzSimons checks out a spate of new books that offer guidance about navigating so-called emerging adulthood.

Several years ago, graduate students in Stanford's psychology department hit upon a prime spot to observe humans in the throes of high-pressure decision making: the grocery store. Posing as reps for a gourmet jam, they offered a range of flavors for shoppers to choose among: six in the first experiment (among them, black cherry, kiwi, and lemon curd), 24 in the second. And then they tallied sales. On the day with six flavors, 30 percent of shoppers walked away with a new jar of jam; on the day with four times that, a mere 3 percent did. The results demonstrated what the researchers dubbed "choice overload": When faced with too many options, the brain becomes overwhelmed and, like a computer with too many windows open, freezes.

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It's perhaps no big coincidence that the jam experiment, as it's become known in the psych world, has made its way into both The Defining Decade and Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?—two in a wavelet of books released this year about life's third decade. The twenties are a period in which big choices are traditionally made— career, partner, lifestyle—and, despite the sputtering economy, this generation (its economically privileged members, at least) has more jams to pick from than its predecessors.

The pool of potential mates is no longer limited to the local bar—we can select among the 1.8 million eligibles on Match.com. If we can't find a career that suits us, we can plot a start-up. And just like the shoppers in the experiment, millennials like me (I'm 27) aren't dashing toward the checkout line either. The five milestones sociologists use to classify someone as an adult—finishing education, declaring financial independence, getting married, having a child, leaving home—had been reached by 77 percent of women in 1960. Today, less than half of twentysomething women are adults, by the academic definition. The pundits are calling us "Peter and Priscilla Pans" and "Kidults"—should we be worried?

The trope of the twenties as a decade for soul-searching is actually a recent development. A century ago, the choices of what to do and who to marry (and one did marry) were much narrower. It wasn't until the rise of the Pill, free love, and feminism, among other social upheavals, that the modern young adult—free to search for a true calling and a soul mate—emerged. And almost immediately it became apparent that all this freedom could be too much of a good thing: In 1968, a year after Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock floated aimlessly in his parents' backyard swimming pool in The Graduate, developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson used the term "quarter-life crisis" to describe one of the eight existential dilemmas he believed marked the human life span. According to Erikson, after leaving the structured world of academia, be it high school or college, with their neatly packaged semester-long intervals and clear-cut objectives (get good grades, graduate), the individual becomes overwhelmed, feels lost, and enters a state of "free-fall."

But by today's standards, Ben had it easy. Thanks to the later and later age of marriage (this generation will spend more time single than any before it), as well as globalization and changes in corporate culture (one in three twentysomethings will change residences this year; millennials will hold, on average, seven jobs by the time they turn 30), young people live a far more transient, uncertain existence than their parents did. And weighing all the newly expanded options is only half the battle: The economy, crippling student loan debt, and skyrocketing rents in major cities are gaping potholes on the road to adulthood.

This may explain why Erikson's quarter-life crisis has gone from obscure (especially compared with its attention-grabbing counterpart, "midlife crisis") to buzzworthy, spawning projects like QuarterLife, an NBC Web series focused on a group of friends in their twenties (à la the late-'80s TV phenomenon Thirtysomething). Journalist Alexandra Robbins was one of the first to bring what she calls "QLC" into the mainstream, with her 2001 best-seller Quarterlife Crisis and its follow-up, Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis. "Oh sure, people were skeptical at first," she tells me. "Bryant Gumbel called us whiny."

I, for one, definitely wish for some better way to understand, not to mention negotiate, this time in my life. When I was growing up, my boomer mom drilled into me that I should spend my twenties trying a variety of professional and personal paths—she did, she said, and was happy for it. While I never took her advice to an extreme—I've had jobs in the same industry and have lived in the same city since graduation—in the back of my mind I've always assumed I had plenty of time to change my mind. Then it hit me earlier this year: By the time my mother was my age, she'd already been married for four years, finished graduate school, settled into her second (and lifelong) career, and—what really blows my mind—had a mortgage on a house. Meanwhile, I'm still on my parents' cell phone plan, and my dad does my income taxes. How did I miss the part about growing up overnight?

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Among my friends, the variation in adultitude is as wide as it's been since middle school: Some seem prematurely middle-aged (spending Saturday night painting their walls sage green, before turning in at ten o'clock); others seem hopeless cases of arrested development (one woman I know has had a string of part-time jobs since graduation and no plans to stop living with her parents). "There's not this lock-step road to maturity there was 60 years ago," says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. "All stages in life, not just one's twenties, are becoming more and more ambiguous." To wit, I've found myself wrapping a Jonathan Adler peacock-shape lollipop holder for a friend's bridal shower in my parents' living room, where I'm temporarily living with barely a lollipop to my name, let alone a holder for it.

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Enter the work of developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, who, in what is arguably the most radical concept to rock the developmental psychology world in decades, essentially argues that my peers and I shouldn't sweat our slow march to adulthood. Arnett posits that the period between ages 18 and 29 should be recognized as a distinct developmental stage called "emerging adulthood" (sandwiched between adolescence and full-blown adulthood), during which the fits and starts of self-exploration should not only be expected but often encouraged. Arnett's theory is bolstered by recent findings that our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for planning, prioritizing, and controlling impulses, isn't fully formed until our late twenties. (If the idea that a stage of our lives could be so distinct yet somehow have gone unnoticed sounds suspect, consider the fact that adolescence wasn't formally recognized until 1904.)

Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?, written by Robin Marantz Henig and her 28-year-old daughter, Samantha, leans heavily on Arnett's research. The authors approach the concept of "emerging adulthood" from the perspective of journalists (they're both writers for The New York Times), with countless sociological stats and psychological studies, as well as from the vantage point of mother and daughter. (One of the book's most memorable moments is when Robin tells Samantha, who's had a disappointing first date, that she's too old to be waiting for a man to make her feel "glowy." "Oh shit…what did I just say?" Robin quickly chides herself.)

Without question, the book makes some solid arguments for delaying adulthood: A woman who has her first child at 26 will earn 72 percent less than a woman who does so at 34. Those who marry before 25 are more likely to divorce. Twentysomethings who move back in with their parents are seven times less likely to fall under the poverty line while under their parents' roof. "I wanted it to be reassuring to readers," Robin says. "A lot of my friends said they found it comforting to know other people were having the same struggles," seconds Samantha. As I read it, I knew what the two were talking about. Phew, I don't have to be an adult, I thought. I'm an emerging adult.

It's the same sense of relief I got from Emma Koenig's book, F*CK! I'm In My Twenties. Koenig, a 24-year-old actress (and, incidentally, the sister of Vampire Weekend front man Ezra Koenig), began a Tumblr of the same name last year, which, in addition to leading to a book deal, has inspired a potential TV show. Her book echoes the themes of Arnett's work—the foolishness of expecting twentysomethings to be fully formed adults—though her portrait is more cartoon than analysis. "I just put it on my Facebook one day, and it got 40 'likes' in an hour," recalls Koenig. "Fuck is an interjection that can mean many things, and that's how I feel about being in my twenties. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be happy about it or frustrated by it."

Meg Jay, a psychologist in private practice and an instructor at the University of Virginia, gives a cold shower to all the happy talk about gliiiiding into adulthood. The very title of her book, The Defining Decade, is chilling. With the exception of Mark Zuckerberg and the Instagram guys, I can't think of a single contemporary who wants to believe that their twenties will set the tone for the rest of their lives. That aversion doesn't surprise Jay. "I know people in their twenties will see that title and think, That's the last thing I want to hear right now."

Jay doesn't so much disagree with Arnett's conception of how people develop—she relies on much of the same information he does, such as the science showing that the brain keeps maturing until around 30. She just thinks that his message can easily be taken the wrong way. "I know what young adults are doing. They're hearing this and thinking [the twenties] is time to waste." Jay's book is filled with examples of clients who've put off adulthood: One almost-30-year-old delayed taking the LSAT during her twenties, though she claimed she wanted to be a lawyer someday, as opposed to a professional bartender. Another went from one-night stand to one-night stand without looking for a serious partner, though she insisted she wanted to get married. "And then they get to 35 and feel like they've been cheated or conned," Jay says.

The more I talked to her, the more her sort of tough-love approach grew on me. It may be scary, but it's also bracing to hear that what you do now will make a lasting impact on your future. Jay rattles off reasons why one's twenties are so crucial: Two thirds of lifetime wage growth occurs within the first 10 years of a career; a woman's fertility peaks in her late twenties. (The Henigs also talk frankly about biology; on the Times Motherlode blog, they had a debate about whether Samantha should freeze her eggs.)

It's not that Jay eschews exploration. She's quick to point out that she didn't get married until her thirties, and her first job after college was driving vans for Outward Bound, which she admits may not have been on her how-to-become-a-psychologist checklist but gave her the chance to learn how people react in challenging situations. "It's one thing to have a life come together at 30," she says. "It's quite another to start building a life at 30."

Ultimately, what Jay and the Henigs all advocate is what I'll call "strategic searching," or searching with an end goal in mind. On the one hand, it sounds sensible; on the other, almost oxymoronic. How can you sincerely throw yourself into testing alternative ways of living if you're always shooting for a certain outcome? I'm reminded of Steve Jobs' studying calligraphy at Reed College, which ultimately—but wholly unexpectedly—informed the brilliant fonts for Apple. "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward," Jobs told graduates in his famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech. That perhaps sums up what's so difficult about navigating your twenties: No matter how informed your decisions, you'll only be able to connect the dots in hindsight. And whatever you choose will inevitably require tweaking. Coontz thinks back to the end of The Graduate, when Ben, having just coaxed the girl of his dreams from the altar and run ecstatically into the future with her, looks off into the distance, stunned, as if to say, What the hell do I do next? "I can well imagine him saying to himself, 'Maybe plastics aren't such a bad idea after all.' "